


between the earth and stars

by AnnaofAza



Category: Voltron: Legendary Defender
Genre: Depression, Heavy Angst, M/M, Season/Series 07, Traveling Through Space, mentions of past Adam/Shiro
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-01-28
Updated: 2019-01-28
Packaged: 2019-10-18 11:35:29
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,113
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/17580050
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/AnnaofAza/pseuds/AnnaofAza
Summary: It takes almost two years to get back to Earth. That's a lot of time for Shiro to think.Too much.





	between the earth and stars

According to Pidge, it’ll take nearly two years to go back home.

At first, everyone is frustrated, understandably so. To be so close yet so far—and to recharge the Lions for their own safety—causes impatience to chomp at the bit. Hours are spent reminiscing about nearly every Earth recipe (“Man, I _miss_ pizza,” Hunk bemoans), their own beds and houses (“Except for the kids’ table,” Lance adds), relatives and friends (“I wonder if my dog will even recognize me?” Pidge wonders), and the sheer luxury of being able to walk outside without checking for the lack of gravity or a breathable atmosphere (everyone).

Even Keith says a few words about the desert—the scorching, dry heat and chilly, star-filled nights and deeply-carved canyons. But he doesn’t mention the shack or the hoverbike, still collecting dust parked outside. No one but Shiro—and presumably Krolia—knows about their days of racing in the sunset, of cramming for exams on the floor of the shack, doing _something._

He should be relieved, as the others are. Lotor is gone—as far as they know. Haggar’s mind control is broken. There are no more (immediate) tracking or reconnaissance or diplomacy stops or invasions to do. They finally get—as Lance crows at least once a day—a break.

But it also allows him to think too much, too many long snatches of time doing nothing, just…getting there.

There’s also the loss of his arm—another thing with too much time to think about. Shiro doesn’t admit missing the weapon the Galra made him— _made him to be_ —but he does mourn the loss of his dominant hand, the easy ability to simply pick up things. Or point. Or balance—something he realized when he first woke up, only to collapse onto Keith.

He should be glad he’s in Keith’s—because she _is_ Keith’s, now—lion. Out of all the paladins, Keith is the one he knows better than anyone, the one he’d told himself he’d come back for before launching to Kerberos.

But for the first time, they don’t know what to say to each other. There are lightyears ahead of them, the easy familiarity lost in the depths of space, and Shiro knows why.

* * *

Sometimes, they play road trip games, mostly jumpstarted by Lance. Allura and Romelle and Coran are enthusiastic participants, eager to keep everyone guessing about what they’ve spotted that begins with an  _exus_ (in time, they had all learned the Altean alphabet).

They attempt charades or pictionary through their screen comms. (Keith, to everyone’s amusement, is awful at drawing.) Coran gets a round robin storytelling game going, with increasingly ridiculous plotlines. Pidge finds a way for them to play Monsters and Mana in separate lions, with the condition that no one can be a paladin.

Sometimes, Hunk makes a truly horrible pun, Lance and Pidge recall pranks at the Garrison, or Coran bursts into Altean folk songs—and they all laugh and Shiro forgets, just for a second.

 And he wishes that was enough. 

* * *

It’s Krolia who suggests battle simulations to keep them sharp, and Shiro agrees that it’s a good idea. They haven’t seen any Galra ships yet, but preparation never hurt anyone.

All too soon, he realizes there’s no place for him there. He can’t pilot any of the lions—not with just one hand—or give orders. The baton has been passed to Keith, whom the others now follow without hesitation. Lance even swerves to avoid a rocketing comet once Keith shouts a warning.

Shiro grips the back of Keith’s seat, feeling useless. He’s not helpless, he tells himself, but it’s hard to convince himself when he’s still getting used to eating with his left hand, almost dropping one of Hunk’s burritos onto the floor.

And, Shiro knows, without his arm, he can’t protect anyone. Without a bayard—that belongs to Keith, now, too—something that was snatched away from him as soon as he got it…

 _You have to train,_ he tells himself. _You have to take control of your life again._

He can do one-armed push-ups. Crunches. Even some weights—yet all he feels is increasing frustration. His body feels weak—and he’d normally make a crack about _well, yes, of course, he came back from the dead,_ but any semblance of amusement, even dark, has been knocked out of him.

Shiro’s fought all his life to not be weak, to not let his body betray him.

But it already has. 

* * *

 _I love you_ , Keith had said.

It plays in his dreams, now, reverberating in his mind. He can feel the blade against Keith’s cheek, slicing cleanly with the sizzle of flesh—the pressure of their weapons locking—the strain of his arm, the urge, the pulsing in his brain, telling Keith to _let go,_ let go of him, let him die—

 That stops him, but not for long. Die?

 After all this time, fighting to stay alive, he wants to give up?

 No, he thinks. He won’t. Not after everything. 

* * *

It doesn’t take long for him to realize something else is wrong.

He can’t feel Black.

She’s been a part of him for so long, as natural as a limb--no, better. They shared a mind, not like Haggar’s parasitic presence, but like two people driving the same ship. It was easy to slip in and out of each other’s thoughts, as easy as breathing. He loved feeling the hum underneath his fingertips, the quiet presence settled in his mind, her soundless words as gentle as a summer breeze. 

But now, it’s...nothing.

The despair hits him, pulling him further apart than ever. Why? Why was this taken from him?

Was it this body? But that shouldn’t matter, shouldn't it, with Black and Voltron working with a mental connection, not a physical one? Did something happen when his conscious was restored?

He feels something sharp and bright and hot in his chest, in his throat--like anger, like tears, like a scream, so powerful that he wants to collapse, beg on his knees for Black to respond to him again.

It’s helplessness, he realizes. Even if he’s returned to himself, nothing truly belongs to him anymore.

“Please,” he whispers that night, while everyone else is asleep, breathing peacefully in the dark. Shiro tries reaching out with his mind like he used to, as easily as taking someone’s hand. “Please,” he repeats, like a spell, like the right combination would _fix_ this. “ _Please_.”

But everything is silence.

* * *

He tries again, again, again, but it’s gone.

Eventually, Shiro stops trying.

* * *

_Patience yields focus. Patience yields focus. Patience yields focus._

But he’s so tired of being patient. Of waiting. Of trying to focus on living.

_You don’t have Black. You don’t have the team. You don’t have anything but yourself._

_No one needs you._

* * *

 It’s selfish, he knows. It’s selfish to want something like this.

 He dreams of Keith lying beside him, at his side wielding his knife, racing through the stars instead of the sunset. They could have been so much, if Haggar hadn’t interfered. Hadn’t taken him away. Hadn’t been perched in his head the whole time, analyzing each move to bring Voltron down, using his body—himself—as a conduit for trust.

 She used him. She used him and it makes him _sick_. Even in prison, his mind was his own, his body his to control, albeit restrained.

 But they were still his. All his.

 It could have been worse, he knows, if Keith hadn’t left to join the Blades.

 Or maybe it could have ended sooner. Keith knew him better than anyone in the Castle. He would have _known_ something was wrong.

 Maybe.

The idea of Haggar using Keith’s trust against him in a long period of time—who knows what Haggar would have done. He’d come close to killing Keith once, had nearly succeeded if it weren’t for the black bayard coming in and slicing off his arm, _saving_ Keith from him, Black rejecting him, considering Shiro a danger enough to protect Keith from him.

That day, he doesn’t join in on any games, any simulations, any conversations.

It’s easy to excuse himself for needing rest, some recovery—almost too easy. Everyone is supportive of it— _eager_ , his mind mocks—and when he wakes up, finds that he’s missed nothing at all.

Outside is nothing but stars and darkness.

He would have given the world to see them like this, up close, once upon a time. But now, Shiro lays his head down again. Closes his eyes. Wishes for something else. 

* * *

 When Shiro wakes up again, it turns out the team has been transported into some intergalactic game show with a grand test of character.

“Bob judges the bravest warriors,” Coran’s saying. “He tests their mettle, judges if they’re worthy.”

 _Worthy_. 

It sounds like a nail-biting ordeal, according to Lance, who’d nearly been boiled to death by acid—not to mention that failure meant staying on the game show forever. Hunk complains about sadistic game show hosts and traps and puzzles. Allura berates Lance’s lack of guessing skills before chatting with Pidge about more ideas to combine Altean and Earth technology. Keith grumbles about the ridiculousness of it all, even suggests punching an all-knowing cosmic entity in the face.

But all Shiro feels is sharp disappointment.

_Worthy._

He wasn’t even _worthy_ even to be judged. To be taken.

 A lost cause.

 No one points out Shiro’s absence, but they don’t have to. They’re the new Voltron. He’s the leftover. The extra. No longer _Shiro the Hero._

 He has nothing left to prove anymore. Nothing left to bother with.

 Adam, it seemed, had been right. Even if it had taken a couple of years.

* * *

He feels like he’s in Black all over again—all thoughts and no body, swirling and clinging to the void, fighting to keep himself on Earth.

 _Why do you want to go on?_ echoes in his head.

Why does he? Is there a point?

He takes a breath. There’s the world. There’s the team. There’s Keith.

There’s just not _him._  

* * *

They stop on a planet— _a pit stop,_ Lance says to Allura, who laughs at the foreign phrase—and everyone sighs in relief when the lions land and the doors open. Hunk groans when a loud crack issues from his back, Lance attempts cartwheels, Coran begins multiple stretches, Pidge blinks sleepily while stumbling from her lion, and Allura and Romelle go to explore the area.

Keith jumps out, scarcely blinking when his wolf appears at his side, and looks up at Shiro.

“Coming?”

“Yeah,” Shiro says faintly. He feels like he hasn’t spoken in days. “Coming.”

He nearly falls again, the lack of weight on his ride side throwing him off again, and Keith catches him.

“You okay?” Keith asks.

 _You should have let me fall,_ Shiro thinks.

“Yeah,” Shiro says, somewhat irritably, then softens his tone: “Thank you for that, Keith.”

“Any time,” Keith says, then shifts to his right foot, looks around. This planet seems endless, stretching to the horizon without so much as a tree or a rock in sight. There are hills, Shiro sees, but nothing to get excited about. Here, they’re only grey heaps of dust. “Good to get out once in a while.”

Shiro only nods, not really listening.

The wolf nudges Keith playfully, then butts his nose against the armor. “Do you want to play?”

Keith asks, scratching it behind its ears. “Are you actually going to, you know, fetch _?”_

“You’re trying to teach a _space wolf_ how to fetch?” Shiro asks, amused.

Keith shrugs, a bit embarrassed. “ _Try_ is the key word. He’s pretty stubborn.”

“Sounds like someone I know.”

“Oh, don’t start,” Keith says, but he’s smiling. “Bad enough Lance is trying out all these horrible space puns, or that Hunk is developing dog food recipes in his lion—Pidge went in there and says it smells awful. I can’t wait to get back to Earth, if only to let him run around. It’s cramped in the ship.”

“Yeah,” Shiro says again. The idea of Earth seems so far away, so far away that he can’t seem to conjure up excitement for it, like Christmas in April.

He hasn’t celebrated Christmas in years, he realizes. Or Fourth of July. Or Thanksgiving. Or even his birthday—which is during a leap year, but still.

If Shiro had stayed, he’d be at home. Home meant the Garrison, Adam, Keith. But it also meant the slow, steady crawl of death, of doctor’s appointments and replacing the wristbands, of waiting for the end, which seemed more certain than it does now.

“It feels strange,” Keith is saying. “Going back. It feels like…it’s not home anymore, you know? Everything’s changed so much.”

“Too much,” Shiro says, smoothing a hand over his head. He’s looked at himself, his starlight-silver hair, the color of someone who should have died a long time ago. It seems almost cruel, resembling so little the person he once was—the scar across the bridge of his nose, the lack of an arm, even the lack of marks underneath his clothes. Haggar, it seemed, wiped him clean.

Keith looks up at him. His hair is pushed slightly from his eyes, violet and—more tired, it seems. “It feels like that, doesn’t it? But what was even there for me back there?” He turns his gaze to the horizon. “After—after you left, there seemed to be nothing worth waiting for.”

“Did you miss Earth at all?” Shiro asks. He knows everyone else did—had families and homes and lives outside of the Garrison—but he doesn’t know, even now, if Keith had mourned anything; Shiro knew enough not to ask anything about Keith’s past, unless Keith brought it up first.

Keith shrugs, scratching his wolf’s head again, then standing back as it begins to charge at Lance, who’s convinced the team to start a nostalgic game of tag. “I guess. But not as much as the others. It just…well, I liked being in the Castle better. In space. With…everyone.”

“Even Lance?” Shiro asks, half-joking.

Lance howls as the wolf knocks him to the ground, licking his face. Pidge and Hunk are laughing, and Coran is turning away, obviously trying to hide his own amusement for the sake of Lance’s pride.

Keith grins. “Yeah. And…it was good. Seeing you again.”

“I guess I was different than what you expected,” Shiro says. He’d replayed it in his head so many times: stepping off the ship in his uniform, space rocks tucked in his pocket and the Holts at his side, triumphant. Failure hadn’t been a possibility, at least not in his mind

“I didn’t care,” Keith says, still not looking at him, eyes still on the team, racing across the planet, the wolf at their heels. Now, his hair’s fallen into his eyes, and Shiro can’t see anything of what’s going on behind them. “As long as you were there. As long as it was you.”

Something in Shiro’s chest tightens. “You shouldn’t say that,” he says, trying to inject logic and stoicism into his voice, authority that he no longer has. “That’s how Haggar fooled you all.”

Keith’s head shoots up, his eyebrows nearly coming together. “What?”

“Maybe it would have been better if I didn’t come back,” Shiro says, then immediately regrets it.

Keith turns towards to him at last, furious. His eyes are flashing deep violet, as sharp as his blade. “Of course you should have! It killed me when you—” He stops, takes a deep, harsh breath, clenching his fists at his sides. “Don’t say that, okay?”

“You would have moved on,” Shiro says.

“Moved on? The first time, I got kicked out of the Garrison! I ran away into the desert! If it weren’t for the Blue Lion calling to me, asking me to search—if you didn’t come back—” Keith shakes his head. “Shiro, that was bad enough. And then when you disappeared again—”

“You would have survived,” Shiro insists. “You can lead Voltron now. You’re the Black Paladin.”

“That’s still you,” Keith shoots back insistently.

Something collapses inside him, as hot as a supernova. _“No, it’s not!_ That’s not me anymore, Keith. I’m not the Black Paladin, I can’t, I…” To his horror, he feels his body shaking, tears welling up, heart racing a mile a minute. _Calm down calm down calm down. You have to be strong; you have to._

“Yes, you _are,_ ” Keith says. “You’re still a paladin of Voltron.”

“No,” Shiro says, and it feels like a break and release all at once. “No, that’s you. That’s Allura and Pidge and Lance and Hunk, not me, not anymore. You can do this without me; you all can.”

“Not without you,” Keith insists. His nails are surely biting into his palms now.

Shiro grits his teeth. _Just let go._ “Yes, you can _.”_  

“No, I can’t!” Keith shouts. “Weren’t you listening to me? Shiro, we _need_ you. Not just in Voltron, but back on Earth, it seemed like everyone just _froze_ after Kerberos; they didn’t know what to do, not with you gone—not even Adam—"

Shiro laughs harshly. “Adam. That’s a name I haven’t heard in a long time.” He scoffs. “Maybe it’s good that we ended it before Kerberos. I was going to marry him, you remember that. Can you imagine being him, waiting for someone to come back?”

“ _Yes_ ,” Keith says. “I can.”

“You dodged a bullet,” Shiro replies, and he utterly means it.

Something sinks in Keith, Shiro sees, light fading from his eyes. “No,” he says softly. “I still was wounded.” 

* * *

That night, Shiro has another nightmare, the blades crossing again, Keith’s pleas, and something new, something that jolts him awake. He doesn’t remember his arm being pulled, his body sliding down and off an edge, falling—falling into nothingness.

Keith is awake—Shiro doesn’t know if he made any noise at all—and a hand’s on his shoulder, squeezing lightly. “Shiro? Shiro, are you okay?”

Falling. Falling from the sky. And tethered to him—Keith. Always Keith.

“I’m fine,” he says, and something in him recoils, of lying to Keith. He’s kept things from Keith, yes, but nothing like this. “I’m all right. Go back to sleep.” 

* * *

The next day, he asks Pidge if he can ride with her back to Earth.

Shiro doesn’t say anything to Keith until it’s time to move on again, and ignores the flash of pain in Keith’s eyes, pulling away from the hand on his shoulder.

Turning away, he follows Pidge up the stairs, away from Keith, without looking back.


End file.
